Chapter 2

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Improve focus and productivity

‘Productivity rests on focused human attention.’

Jeremy Hunter, PhD, Professor at Drucker School
(on executive management and MBA)

Among the many praises sung to the fruits of mindfulness, perhaps the loudest and most attractive to businesses has been that of the impact of mindfulness practice on increasing productivity and focus among employees. This may come as no great surprise but in this modern age the need to sharpen job-focused attention and harness specific skills designed to improve work-related efficiency has never been more pressing.

In this chapter we hope to help you understand:

• What it is that gets in the way of our task-focused attention and resultant level of productivity.
• How we can successfully navigate our way through the relentless competing demands, expectations and distractions that prevent us from getting the job done (well).
• How mindfulness can improve our focus and productivity at work.
• How to implement focused-attention and productivity-boosting mindfulness practices into your working day.

Checking-in is checking out

In a technologically advancing modern world where digital devices are taking an increasingly prominent place in our working lives, our ability to sustain focus and attention (for any significant length of time, anyway) is fast becoming problematic for so many of us. Reaching for the closest mobile device, running through the routine checks of our various online accounts, our work emails, social media, instant messages and the latest news alerts has become a habitual pattern for most of us (and that’s usually before our feet have even touched the floor in the morning). These routine checks continue throughout the day and are often not planned but instead impulsive reactions to the next buzz, bleep or flashing red light being emitted from one or more of our mobile devices or just as often to a sudden thought, like, ‘Ooo, I haven’t checked my phone for the last five minutes!’. One cost arising from all this checking and doing is that our attention is becoming fractured into tinier and tinier pieces, and we may find that we are never actually in the one place that we intend to be or ever truly focused on the one task we had hoped to get done. In business terms this easily translates into real financial costs. The more distracted we are at work, the less productive and effective we will be. Makes sense, no? This is understandably problematic for the bottom-line profitability of any business where the prevailing model in its simplest terms is usually rather linear, and looks something like this:

Although distraction while on the job is an inevitable part of the deal in this modern day and age, more and more companies are turning towards mindfulness as a means to reduce the growing levels of inattention among their plugged-in and switched-on employees. So let’s take a look at all this and see what exactly mindfulness has to offer when it comes to our work-related focus and productivity.

Keep your eye on the ball

Massive corporations and institutions have embraced this unusual technique as a means of generating higher yield, better quality services and products, and improved profit margins in the workplace, as well as having a happier, healthier workforce. Efficiency and quality are essential elements for the production of any form of work, from baking the daily loaf to the provision of financial services. So it is no wonder that businesses are increasingly using mindfulness as a cost-effective empirically supported method of increasing the productivity and focus of their workforces.

The industrial revolution and advent of the machine, as well as the more recent enormous advances in technology have all increased the expectations and pace over the past 200 years exponentially to their current global, 24-hour, 5-star gold standards. There are tighter and tighter rules, restrictions, policies and regulations, meaning that more than ever we must not slip up, and if we do, the consequences are dire – redundancy, bankruptcy, liquidation, etc. Whether it is our own face or that of our company or business, if we don’t keep focused and productive (preferably to the highest level and in line with consumer demands), we are all going to end up with egg all over it and looking for another (precarious) job.

Hopefully you have not been, nor ever will go there. It isn’t nice, it isn’t fun and it is a huge dent to our confidence to even think about going there. On the other hand, sometimes we can feel as if it is the fear of it all going arse up that keeps us on top of the game (if that doesn’t sound too dodgy a metaphor!). The thrill of the chase is the knife edge that keeps us sharp and makes us and our businesses tick, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, this simply does not hold up. When we feel stressed we react in very similar ways as all vertebrate mammals do to threat – our fight or flight response kicks in instinctively – our field of attention becomes narrowed to the perceived or actual danger, our heart rate increases, our muscles become primed for action and a whole host of other physiological reactions ensue. Despite this primal response to danger originally being intended for our caveman/woman days when we were simply trying to survive, our brain still interprets modern-day stress in the same way and our physiological responses are also identical. The necessary narrowing of our field of attention and impairment of rational thinking or complex decision-making when we need to either fend off an attacker or run like hell is a result of a decrease in oxygen to the brain and an increase in oxygen to the limbic system – really useful for running from that sabre-toothed tiger, but it makes for poor decisions in the boardroom, on the trading floor, in challenging interpersonal interactions, or any other adrenaline-inducing situation we may be faced with at work . We’ll return to looking at the impact of our threat system on our focus and productivity in just a second but first off, if you commonly find that the only thing that might be preventing you being mistaken for a scatty caveman/woman is your slick business suit in place of a tatty leopard-skin loincloth, then you might like to try the following exercise.

Exercise 2.1: Mindful on the job

Take a chill pill!

If you feel that your stress levels are rising, maybe you have a zillion thoughts rushing around your mind and are finding it hard to focus or think in any clear way or maybe your body is full of tension, then you might like to try this quick exercise to cool down and regain a sense of clarity and focus once again. This is a simple exercise which involves taking some perspective on your experience by simply taking the time to curiously notice and then label it just what it is. This may sound about as useful as an inflatable dartboard especially when there’s so much to get done at work, but stepping back in this way can really help you to cultivate a sense of calm and ultimately retain your sense of sharp focus when the heat is on. So why not give it a go now and then continue to practise this one regularly:

1. First, begin by noticing your breath entering and leaving your body. Pay attention to the sensations of breathing on each in-breath and each out-breath.
2. Once you feel more present and focused on your breath, continue with the following steps.
3. Next see if you can notice some of the thoughts that your mind is giving you and begin to label them with one of three categories (i.e. ‘past’, ‘future’ or ‘judgement’). You may notice thoughts about what has happened (such as ‘I can’t believe he spoke to me like that!’ or the like) so then label them as ‘past’. You may notice thoughts about what is about to happen (such as ‘I’m going to totally mess up this presentation, every-one is going to see I’m useless!’) so then label them as ‘future’. You may have thoughts about yourself, others or any particular situation, including this exercise itself (such as ‘I’m not thinking any thoughts!’, ‘This is a stupid exercise’, ‘I’m/he/she/it is hopeless’, or the like) so label them as ‘judgement’. You might like to also imagine these thoughts as leaves on a stream as you watch them float away or as clouds passing through the sky. Notice how each one passes by when you simply label them and untangle yourself from listening to what they have to say.
4. Next notice how you feel emotionally and label it. You may feel anger, sadness, anxiety or anything else. So whichever emotion you notice, just silently say to yourself, ‘I feel X right now’. If you can’t feel any strong emotion, that’s OK also; just notice and label that (i.e. ‘I don’t feel any strong emotion right now’).
5. Finally, notice how your body feels. You may notice tension in your shoulders, nausea in your stomach or anything else. Or no strong sensation at all. Again, just notice and then label whatever is there, silently saying to yourself, ‘I feel X in my body right now’. You do not need to fix any of these experiences or sensations, or figure them out; there is nothing to fight or flee from, just experience to notice with curiosity.

Adrenaline flunkies

As we’ve said, when we are fuelled by anxiety, the effect of adrenaline distorts our thinking. Our ability to make rational and balanced decisions diminishes and in fact our risk-taking increases. We are physio-logically tipped into ‘red alert’ when we are anxious. The brain’s alarm centre, or amygdala, is activated when we perceive a threat and hormones are released such as adrenaline. We also have an increase in alpha-amylase – a digestive enzyme which breaks starches into sugars – levels in saliva (if you recall the study from Chapter 1), which cause a more rapid heart rate and increase in blood flow to the muscles so that we can physically respond quickly to danger. As mentioned and as you can now hopefully appreciate, this is not as useful for our feelings about presentations as it used to be for fending off predators. The judgements we then make are suited to quick and extreme measures (flight or fight), which are simply not sensible while on the job.

Some people do love the feel of these moments, however, and justify them to themselves as how they feel the sharp edge of business and the ‘killer instinct’. What this means in reality is that those types of people are more likely to make rash and risky choices and to impair their ability to consider things rationally.

‘One need not spend much time in business settings to observe that reason does not always seem to rule.’

Donald Langevoort, Professor of Law at Georgetown University

The thrill of these moments occurs because fear is also very closely similar in physiological terms to excitement; some of us simply interpret an event (such as a presentation or meeting a predator) as exhilarating and others are scared out of their wits. So some of us love it, some of us hate it; however, anxiety/excitement impairs all of us when we need to make clear, focused and rational decisions. The ‘killer instinct’ is simply our caveman/woman tendencies being activated, not really the height of cool sophistication and definitely not the most effective way to run your business. Don’t mistake your thrill or fear for focus and effectiveness or you may end up making a big balls up of it all. Check out our top five tips (below) to ensure that you don’t let your fear get in the way (these are adapted from an article published in Psychology Today which you can check out from the link in the ‘Useful resources’ section at the end of this chapter if you wish).

Five tips for when we know fear might lead to stupid choices

1. Keep calm and get out of the way

Remember that risk and high levels of emotion are inseparable.

Why do we know this?

Because:

We are frightened of snakes, but cars are OK?! Our survival instinct is a little out of sync with modern life, clearly. For instance, we know that spiders and snakes cause us fear out of any proportion to the dangers that they pose, while fast driving, well, doesn’t. A fast approaching predator would cause us to freeze instinctively, which for many predators reduces their chance of seeing you (remember that bit with T-Rex in Jurassic Park?), phew! Unfortunately this is not a good tactic when a car is speeding towards you. It is therefore important to remember the great benefits of keeping calm and appraising a situation rationally – mere instinct alone isn’t always effective.

2. Keep calm and look out for the ones acting normally

Fear biases risk analysis.

Why do we do that?

Because:

Dramatic events pique our attention (that’s why the news likes to report a few daily catastrophes), and as a result, we overestimate the odds of dreadful but infrequent events and underestimate how risky ordinary events are. Therefore, the more dramatic and unusual an event, the more we think this needs attention, while we are prone to ignoring the more common, frequent and familiar risks of the everyday. After 9/11, for example, 1.4 million people changed their holiday travel plans to avoid flying. The vast majority chose to drive instead. But driving is far more dangerous than flying (according to US transport statistics for 2013, motorcycling is more than 3,000 times more deadly than flying, while travelling in a car or truck is about 100 times more deadly than flying), and the decision to switch caused roughly 1,000 additional automobile fatalities, according to two separate analyses comparing traffic patterns in late 2001 to those the year before. In other words, 1,000 people who chose to drive wouldn’t have died had they flown instead.

3. Keep calm, it’s behind yoooou!

We underestimate threats that creep up on us.

Why do we do that?

Well, we could wait until tomorrow to answer that, but it’s because:

If a risk is not imminent we tend to ignore it. So the threat of smoking or scoffing all those pies doesn’t usually frighten us even though rationally we are all aware of the long-term health risks if we do these things regularly.

‘Things that build up slowly are very hard for us to see’, says Kimberly Thompson, a professor of risk analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health. Obesity and global warming are in that category. ‘We focus on the short-term even if we know the long-term risk.’

4. Keep calm we all know health and safety is a load of old …

We replace one risk with another.

What??

Why?

Did you know that studies have found that we speed up when we put our seatbelts on? Certain safety feature in cars (such as better brakes or four-wheel drive) have also not been found to reduce accidents, just change the type of accident. This is because people normalise their risk-taking to a certain level and then adjust their behaviour to match this, not therefore cutting the overall risk. So we’ll eat the salad (hold the dressing), followed by a Triple-Chocolate-Marshmallow-Cream-Tower, please.

5. Keep calm and keep calm

Fear is bad for your health (just something else to worry about next time you feel anxious).

Not another health scare …

Go on (sigh), why?

Ebola, cancer, terrorist attack, plane crash – dramatic? Attention grabbing (did you read point 2 already?) You may even have your own special fear (hand coming out of the toilet …? No? Oh … we’ll shut up now). Well, here’s a lovely little factlet: the odds of dying from any of these things is teeny-weeny compared to the damage that the fear of these things does. Chronic stress harms our bodies: lowering the immune system, triggering mental health problems and causing long-term cardiovascular damage, among other things.

So what’re we going to do about it?

Alright, being anxious makes you a bit silly. But we can’t just STOP, can we? Go on, try … Imagine a gun to your head, and if the cat-suited assassin with their super-high-tech fear detector gets even a whiff from you (ick) on the meter, then they will shoot … feeling calm? Still alive? No. Good job this is just imaginary or we would have no readers left. We can’t just push fear away because we know it is silly, ineffective and impairs our focus and decision-making. But we do know that fear is based on future, past or imagined events. For instance, fear thoughts might take the shape of:

• Future fears:
  • I will be fired if I do/say … (something wrong).
  • Everyone is going to think … (something awful)
  • But what will happen if I … (screw up)?
• Past fears:
  • Last time I did this … (something terrible happened)
  • I remember when I said … (something silly)
  • Yesterday it all went … (Pete Tong)
• Imagined fears:
  • I wish I were … (anything better than this)
  • If only I could be … (anywhere/one better than here/me)

Actually these are all taking place in the imagination, created by the mind and not based on direct, in-the-moment experience. Even a memory is a construction of the imagination, as it is not real in terms of present-focused time. We can be so habituated in creating fear-based narratives and constructions of the world around us that we start to believe our own stories, and then the world does, our bodies respond ‘as if’ this were true and we experience stress.

‘I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.’

Mark Twain

So when we focus on the present (as we invited you to try in Exercise 2.1 above), ping, our worries are gone. Our mind is massively habitual so we will inevit-ably go back to thinking about the stuff that induces all these anxious feelings, but attend back to the present moment again and the anxiety is just a collection of quite amazing physical sensations (rapid heartbeat, sweaty palms, nausea, etc.). Our thinking mind will scramble around to make a story out of these (Possible heart attack? Impending doom? Moment of glory?), but cut the fantasising and catastrophising, leave it alone and we can return to our observation of the continually shifting sensations of the body. Weirdly, our anxiety will naturally subside when we just take our hands off it; a few moments noticing the soles of our feet on the floor or a few breaths and we find that the mind will learn to settle, we stop struggling, we become focused. We use mindfulness to do this, to turn the mind and train it back to the present, to where there is really not so very, very much to have to figure out, nothing generally at all to fight or run from. Gradually we can then learn that to maintain this simply takes the practice of doing one thing at a time, with wholehearted attention. We lessen anxiety, we improve focus and as a result we will be more productive.

And yes, we did say, do one thing at a time. That goes to you out there stuffing your sandwich in your mouth, fiddling with your phone and jumping up and down while you read this.

Now, tell us what the hell is that all about?

The world’s finest couch potato

Well, in order to make a bit more sense of our attempts to do a trillion things at once, we encourage you right now to recognise how your mind evolved to problem-solve. It was designed to scan its environment, take in any and as much data as possible, and then evaluate it and problem-solve it away. Why our brains are wired in this way we will come back to in a bit more detail soon enough, but for now, we encourage you to think of your brain as a slovenly, couch potato. Go on, as weird as it might seem, just imagine it sitting there, laid back on the sofa, feet up, gorging on junk food, snacks and sweets, without any consideration for how full it already is; with an insatiable appetite it just keeps scoffing more and more, often trying to process and digest more than one thing at the same time. Now that sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Do you ever try to tackle more than one task at once? That’s right, this all sounds a bit like multitasking. And that’s good, as we humans are great at multitasking, right? … Well, erm … No!

Exercise 2.2: Work in progress

Multitasking experiment

Here are just a couple of tests to dispel any ideas you may have about the effectiveness of multitasking, one of the biggest myths which prevails about efficiency:

You work at BizzyBeez, an innovative, new start-up company teaching workers skills in efficiency, focus and motivation. The boss is coming and she is looking to promote the office’s most focused and productive employee to the role of ‘grand high Queen or King Bee’. This is the (really easy) task she has set you to find out if you can make it:

Task instructions

Do each of the following, making no errors or hesitations.

Do the whole task in under 60 seconds.

Do them all at the same time.

Task

1. Recite the alphabet.
2. Wave your left arm in a circle at least 20 times.
3. Text a message to your closest work colleague saying: ‘Read Working with Mindfulness it is amazing’.

How did you do? Did you meet your deadline with perfection? Are you getting that promotion from the big cheese?

OK, OK, she’ll give you another go (because she likes you lots) and this time she wants you to do the same exact set of tasks but this time:

DO THEM ONE AT A TIME.

How’d it go this time? How were the stress levels? Errors? Hesitations? Are you going to be ‘grand high Queen or King Bee’ (yes!) and if you didn’t make it, then we hope you at least sent those texts!

So, joking aside (just for a moment mind, you know us by now), we’re not very good at multitasking; it stresses us out, we take longer to get things done and we make more mistakes in the process. In fact, there’s some ground-breaking and really interesting research¹ that came out from Stanford University that actually backs this all up. The researchers in this study found that those of us that might attempt to do more than one task at a time (erm, isn’t that all of us?), like engaging in more than one email or text or social media conversation at once, while watching TV, surfing the net and trying to get some work done (we don’t know, like writing a book maybe!) … are actually paying a big mental price. A hundred students were recruited into this study and put through a series of tests. Those that were ‘heavy multimedia multitaskers’ were easily led astray: ‘everything distracts them’, one of the researchers said. Despite this the researchers were still keen to find out what, if any, benefits come from multitasking and split the participants into two groups: those that tended to do a lot of multitasking and those that didn’t, and ran a series of further tests. The results were astonishing. The group of students who did a lot of multimedia multitasking performed worse on all the tests; they found it harder to discriminate and filter out irrelevant information and displayed a poorer working memory. In fact, there were no positive benefits from multitasking whatsoever; those participants that tended to do a lot of multitasking were found to lose focus more easily, they felt more stressed, they took longer to do assigned tasks and they made more mistakes and experienced more physical and mental tiredness to boot.

Even though most of us can experience pretty similar, dire outcomes from multitasking our way through our working days, we still continue to multi-task. So, why do we persist? Well, what this research tells us is that the more we multitask the more we multitask; it becomes a habit and we just keep reinforcing the same old habit, doing it over and over again; it becomes our default response to the world and our work, day after day. And the habit becomes so reinforced that even when on those very rare occasions when we may find ourselves having only one thing to do (as if!), like fall asleep at night, our mind says, ‘OK great, easy-peasy, let’s do that but what else can I do at the same time’?! and then starts to wander off, thinking about anything and everything else it can, like WORK (getting in the way of our much needed rest). So, as we continue to multitask, we are actually increasing our distractibility more and more. And it’s pretty clear (as you know too well from the exercise above) how trying to do more than one thing at once can be detrimental to our productivity and successes at work.

Increasing distractibility

So what per centage of our time awake is spent with our mind distracted away from the present moment – go on, have a guess . . . ?

Well, the research² tells us that on average we spend 46.9 per cent of our time awake with our mind wandering away from the here and now: that’s basically half of our life (when we’re not asleep, that is). The researchers of this study were also able to provide us with a breakdown of what this might actually look like during the different and specific activities that we tend to get up to most days (check out the percentage while we’re at work!). Here’s what one of them said:

‘How does that rate depend on what people are doing? When we looked across 22 activities, we found a range – from a high of 65 per cent when people are taking a shower or brushing their teeth, to 50 per cent when they’re working, to 40 per cent when they’re exercising. This went all the way down to sex, when 10 per cent of the time people’s minds are wandering. In every activity other than sex, however, people were mind--wandering at least 30 per cent of the time, which I think suggests that mind-wandering isn’t just frequent, it’s ubiquitous. It pervades everything that we do.’

Matt Killingsworth (From an article on mindful.org; follow the link in the ‘Useful resources’ section for the full article)

Just think how much more productive we could be with our time at work if we could train our mind to focus on the job at hand rather than thinking about some other time or place, or all that we should or would prefer to be doing instead. In fact, this research also suggests that it is not just productivity and focus which is compromised by our wandering mind, but also our very happiness. In the Harvard University 2,250 adults with ages ranging from 18 to 88 were given an app for their mobile device and randomly interrupted throughout the day and asked three simple questions, along the lines of:

1. What are you doing right now?
2. What are you thinking about?
3. How happy to do feel?

The results were really quite interesting: those people who were focused on the present moment and task at hand were happier than those whose mind had wandered away to think about something else, irrespective of how boring, effortful or stressful the task in the present moment actually was. Yes, you read that correctly: regardless of the pleasure we get from any given activity, our happiness is decreased by mind-wandering thoughts be they unpleasant, pleasant or neutral ones – and, yes, even pleasant thoughts actually appear to decrease your happiness even when you are engaged in an unpleasant task!

Furthermore, our mind-wandering seems very likely to actually cause unhappiness rather than it being a consequence of it. For example, even if we are having a miserable journey to work and thinking about something pleasant, like having a nice hot bath later, we actually feel less happy than if we just stayed focused on the cr*ppy journey (watch the TED talk by Matt Killingsworth listed in the ‘Useful resources’ section at the end of this chapter if you want to hear more on this). The message is simple: when our mind is wandering away from the present moment, thinking about this and/or that other piece of work, meeting we have to get to or anything else we have to get done (exciting or not) we are unhappier than when our minds are focused on the here and now. The researchers conclude ‘a wandering mind is an unhappy mind’. So, without addressing this mind-wandering, distracting, multitasking tendency, we are very much at risk of turning into one large, miserable, frazzled workforce of zombies, knocking around (and into one another) with varying degrees of attention deficit disorder, not getting much done at all (and not very contentedly).

So how well can you manage your attention? How difficult can it actually be to focus on just one thing at once? Well, if you’re willing, we invite you to give this a try right now – see how you get on. We are going to give you some tips along the way. Here goes:

Exercise 2.3: Work in progress

How well can you manage your attention?

1. Close your eyes (once you have finished reading these instructions – it helps limit the billions of pieces of extra distracting data that enter our mind through our eyeballs).
2. Bring your attention to your breath (it may take a few minutes to rest your attention on your breath).
3. See if you can notice the sensations of air entering your nostrils as you breathe in – harness your attention to that sensation and try to keep that sensation at the forefront of your attention.
4. Now, just stay focused on your breath in this way … for about the next 2 minutes (just estimate the time; it doesn’t need to be exact).

Once you have had a go at the above exercise, then continue reading …

Done? OK, so how did you do? How was that? Easy? Difficult? Were you distracted? Possibly by thoughts? Sounds? Something else?

This was a simple instruction, huh? ‘Just focus your attention on your breath’. You can’t get much simpler than that, but it is really difficult to be simple, isn’t it? The mind is so unruly and highly conditioned. Most people tend to find that their attention is distracted by thoughts that show up in their mind. These can be really random. They can be about something that happened in the past or the future. They may be focused on the exercise itself, say with judgements, opinions or preferences about what you’re doing and/or the experience you are having (‘I wish that air con could just stop making that racket, it’s getting in the way of me focusing on my breath!’). Whatever your thoughts happened to be about, they probably fitted into one of these categories (past, future, or evaluation/judgement). As humans, we have between 50,000 and 70,000 thoughts that show up in our mind in any given day (that’s a pretty impressive amount, although we’re not entirely sure how they can actually measure that!). Of course the specific content of these will vary hugely between us as we all live out our own individual, unique lives, but the themes of our thinking, whether they are concerned with the past, the future or evaluative and judgemental in some way, are the same for us all. We’re all very much in the same boat and don’t differ at all from one another in that way.

If your attention wandered away from your breath during this exercise, that really is absolutely fine; it’s not any sign of failure (and it doesn’t mean ‘mindfulness doesn’t work’ or that you ‘can’t do it’!). If your mind did wander away from your breath, please do remember that is normal and just what the human mind does. Much like a puppy (or any other small being that you may have tried to train!), the mind is inquisitive and will want to rummage around curiously, sniff about a bit and pick things up. Distraction is not failure; it’s HUMAN. Remember, the instruction was ‘TRY’ to keep the sensation of your breath at centre stage in your attention, it wasn’t empty your mind or eliminate all thoughts or block out all other distractions – see the difference? Distraction and a wandering mind are also experiences that we can simply notice (with openness and acceptance) in our mindfulness practice and as soon as we have done that, BAM! we are back in the present moment, and then have the choice (should we choose to take it) to then gently return our attention back to where we intended it to be in the first place, and in the case of the above exercise, to noticing our breath.

Although we can’t ultimately prevent our mind from ever wandering away from the task at hand again, we can see that just letting it run on autopilot without any effort on our part to rein it back in is not going to be helpful at all if we want to retain any level of focus and productivity at work. A wandering mind is an old habit that has been reinforced for some time and like any other entrenched habit it is a really difficult one to kick, especially in this day and age with so much demanding our attention. The other reason for this is that what happens to most of us when we attempt to multitask is that we falsely believe that the more jobs we try to cram into as little time as possible, the more we will get done, and we get a nice fat hit of reinforcing adrenaline in all the panic too. Trying to juggle a lot of things at the same time can make us feel important, showing others just how time pressured we are and creating a drama of activity to prove we are somehow ‘coping’. As we’ve already discussed, some people find this exciting and it can be quite addictive. Unfortunately, as we’ve also already seen, we are usually actually being highly inefficient, genuinely getting stressed and making a bit of a boo-boo of it all. Gaining even a small foothold in all the pandemonium of our multi-tasking efforts seems only to reinforce the notion that it actually works, so tiny successes in all the high-stress activity feel like great gains. Basic-ally, folks, this is not cool. Even if you get these tasks done, you are not doing them well, or definitely not as well as you could. Daniel Goleman, in his excellent book Focus, writes:

‘Then there’s what many people think of as ‘splitting’ attention in multitasking, which cognitive science tells us is a fiction, too. Rather than having a stretchable balloon of attention to deploy in tandem, we have a narrow, fixed pipeline to allot. Instead of splitting it, we actually switch rapidly. Continual switching saps attention from full concentrated engagement.’

(Goleman, 2013, pp. 19–20)

As addicted as we are to multitasking, it simply is not smart. So just try weaning yourself away from the urge to do it all, now, this minute and try (what your mother probably told you anyway) to do one thing at a time (and don’t talk with your mouth full).

Setting the ground rules for multitasking

Yes we know, multitasking isn’t just going to go away because we now know it’s not clever and you’ve read about its pitfalls in this book. As we’ve seen, it’s become a habit, right? And even though we realise it’s not going to get us anywhere closer to achieving our goals in a timely, product-ive, calm and focused fashion, that doesn’t stop the boss and everyone else at work expecting us to do it all at once anyway (until they read this book, that is), like NOW ALREADY! So how can we best navigate our way through the plethora of demands and expectations coming at us from every single angle, all at the same time throughout our working day?

Well, we thought this would be a good moment to introduce you to Tina, who works as Legal Counsel, specialising in commercial litigation, at a large corporate law firm.

To sharpen your own task-focused attention (and decrease your chances of being sidetracked by unhelpful and irrelevant distractions), try the following two exercises (and repeat them again and again, as often as you like).

Exercise 2.4: Mindful on the job

Working lunch – focus on one thing at a time

Give your undivided attention as far as possible to the following exercise. Once you have finished task X, give your undivided attention to task Y; while doing task X give your whole attention to just that (these tasks can be replaced with any other relevant activities; the idea is to give yourself a task which feels pressing and that you might normally try to do at the same time as at least one other thing).

How often do you eat while looking at messages or surfing the net, etc.? Do you bolt down a quick sandwich without even tasting it? Maybe you get hungry again later because you just forgot to notice that you even ate? Maybe you even skip lunch altogether or end up with crumbs and mayonnaise all over the keyboard (yeah, really nice)? This is a very, very common type of multitasking which is really multi-fasting: your focus is going hungry. So when you’re next feeling hungry, go grab your favourite, most delicious sandwich (or whatever you fancy to eat), take a seat in front of your computer and try this exercise:

X = open and answer one pressing work email

Y = eat your delicious sandwich

1. Focus on X.
2. Feel the pull towards doing Y, or anything else; you need not act on this.
3. Notice the sensations arising in the body.
4. Return your focus to X.
5. Notice any thoughts arising about task Y; you need do nothing with these.
6. Let the thoughts alone.
7. Return your thoughts to task X.
8. Be aware of any urge to avoid this moment.
9. Continue with task X alongside any emotions/sensations (irritation, impatience, joy, hunger, etc.); you need not push these away, just let them linger as you focus on X.
10. Complete task X with the best quality of attention you can.
11. Completely finish task X, and leave it.
12. Now focus on task Y.
13. If your mind turns back to reviewing or replaying task X, bring it as fully as possible to task Y.
14. Feel the pull towards task X; you need not act on or think further on this.
15. Engage fully with the sensations of task Y.
16. Immerse yourself in this moment.
17. If you feel the pull towards the future or past, notice this.
18. Return your attention to task Y; notice what arises.
19. Allow yourself just this one moment, right here, just as it is.
20. Finish task Y and let your attention flow to the next task now.

Reflections: watch how the mind pulls towards future events, maybe trying to avoid working on a difficult or unpleasant task and leaning into a future time when it is over. Alternatively you might be avoiding the moment by constantly thinking about something that needs to be done later.

Exercise 2.5: Mindful on the job

Getting smart with your smartphone

‘Meditation is the ultimate mobile device; you can use it anywhere, anytime, unobtrusively.’

Sharon Salzberg

We first included a version of the following exercise in Mindfulness for Busy People (Sinclair and Seydel, p. 64) and as we’ve been told how helpful it has been to so many readers, particularly in training their minds to be more focused while they’ve been at work, we thought we’d include an updated version here.

Like so many of us, you might also feel as if your mobile phone has become an extension of your body. We tend to pick them up (if we ever actually put them down) hundreds of times a day without any real awareness of doing so. One reason we continue to do this is as an attempt to quell feelings of anxiety and stress. By checking our phones regularly we feel that we can get on top of new emails and messages before they escalate and take up even more of our precious time and attention (you can read more about this in Chapter 6). We have become habituated to checking our phone and this checking behaviour and all the worries about what emails may have come through since we last checked can serve as a great distraction, a real obstacle that gets in the way of our focus and productivity with other more pressing and/or more meaningful tasks. So to really train your brain to be more focused, go grab your phone (we bet it’s not far away at all) now and try this exercise and then repeat it often.

1. Start by sitting or standing with your phone either in your lap, pocket or by the side of you.
2. Take a moment to become aware of the presence of your phone, and then as you do so, take a few mindful breaths, noticing the sensations of air entering your body on the in-breath and leaving your body on the out-breath.
3. Now pick up your phone and hold it in your hand. Do nothing else with your phone.
4. Take a moment to notice the sensation of how your hand/arm is now one phone heavier.
5. Notice any urges, impulses (maybe you can notice a slight twitching in your fingers) to open and check your phone.
6. Recognise how these impulses are automatic, a response that has been reinforced by checking your phone time and time again.
7. Notice any thoughts that arise in the mind about emails on your phone, work generally or anything else.
8. Notice if impatience, anxiety or boredom (in not checking your phone), or any other feeling arises.
9. Leave all these urges, impulses, thoughts and feelings alone. There is no need to respond to these, act on them or follow them in any way. They too will pass.
10. Just notice this moment as it is – just you, just holding your phone, nothing else to do.
11. Now take your time to notice the temperature of your phone: is it warm or cool as it rests in your hand?
12. Next take a moment to gaze upon your phone: notice its colour, markings and how the light reflects off its surface.
13. Run your fingers around your phone and notice its texture, bumps, and indentations. Does it feel smooth or rough in places? Notice this.
14. Now put your phone down once again, placing it back into your pocket, on your lap or beside you.
15. Take a moment to notice how your hand/arm feels as it is now one phone lighter.
16. To end the exercise, take a few mindful breaths, noticing the sensations of air entering and leaving your body.
17. Then congratulate yourself for staying as focused and present as you could be while engaging with your phone in an entirely new way.

Reflections: training the mind to be present for the sake of our improved focus and performance takes effort and commitment. It is best done with tasks or at times when we would usually be caught up in automatic responses, just like we are most of the time when checking our phones. In doing an exercise like this, we can notice the strong pull towards habitual impulses and patterns of behaviour and thought that can lead us to distraction, away from the here and now. In choosing not to follow these impulses (time and time again), we are training the mind to be more present when we want it to be.

Training the wise mind

The exercises in this chapter (and there are more to come) are designed to help you train your mind so that you can strengthen your ability to stay focused on the task at hand when you want to. We understand that compelling distractions can come in all shapes and sizes. For example, there are demands from other people, knocking on your door, incessantly firing email after email into your inbox, sending you instant messages or calling your telephone. If it’s not other people that are preventing you from getting the job done, then, as we’ve begun to highlight, it is often your very own wandering mind itself. But what if these irritating distractions come in other forms, you know, like the ones that we have no apparent control over. Time and time again, we are asked this question and usually by people who work in open-plan offices, whether that’s sharing a large office floor with a hundred (really inconsiderate and noisy) others, hot-desking around the building or bustling about on a trading floor. ‘What am I supposed to do then, well? ARGHH! I just can’t stand all the noise, I can’t keep focused. There’s a constant hum that never shuts up!’ Well, again, we would advise that you watch out for those exact (or similar) types of thoughts themselves first, as you may find that unhooking yourself from them, simply noticing and labelling them, gives you at least a little more peace and quiet to get some more of your work done. Failing that, it might be time to think again, and maybe creatively too (see Chapter 4 for more on creativity).

The practice of mindfulness not only helps us to create space from our own productivity-defeating habits (i.e. the multitasking, the wandering mind), but within that space we might also be more open and able to think more wisely and choose a preferred practical response about what is best to be done about a particular predicament, including a noisy work environment. Like Tina in the earlier example, who realised that binning her sweets and tissues would be a good move, you too might find that making some strategic and practical changes to your immediate work environment/desk/station is just the wise move you need to take to get more work done. So, if you’ve got a pressing deadline and your experience tells you that the noise pollution booming out of your open-plan office is likely to get in the way, then what else could you do? Book a meeting room? Arrange to work from home maybe? Sometimes we overlook these simple (but wise) moves because we are all too often caught up in the worry and rumination, ranting about the problem in our own minds (and to anyone else that can bear to listen), expecting the world around us/others to be different or change first. Now stop that at once; it’s time to get wise.

Here are our top seven wise moves (which you just may not have thought of yet!) to limit distractions:

1. Shut down all unnecessary open windows on your desktop (especially those instant messaging boxes and news alerts!).
2. Whack your phone on to aeroplane mode (better still, turn the damn thing off for a while, if you dare).
3. Book out a meeting room.
4. Let others know you’re not available (do whatever it takes: stick the ‘DO NOT DISTURB’ sign on your door/forehead).
5. Work from home.
6. Get a sound-masking app for your phone and plug in some headphones (check out the link in the ‘Useful resources’ section at the end of this chapter for a fantastic, scientifically proven prod-uctivity-boosting sound app that can block out background noise– awesome)!
7. Remember: take some mindful breaths.

So why might it be so difficult to keep focused?

Our tendency to have an active mind can be traced back to the days of our cave-dwelling ancestors. They weren’t a very confident bunch and needed a sharp tool to survive the threatening, survival-of-the-fittest type world in which they found themselves. They needed to be on high alert, think on their feet, evaluate and problem-solve their new environment: ‘Will that roaring four-legged thingymejigy behind that bush over there, now moving closer and faster towards me (eek!), eat me or not!?’ Now, whether or not that all sounds very similar to your work environment (!), the fact is that our minds haven’t evolved much over this time, and today we still have this razor-sharp problem-solving tool, primed and ready to scan our landscape, designed to protect us from danger and threats to our survival. Now of course this problem-solving mind is often really useful and can help us excel in our work, BUT in this modern, information-overloaded world, that tool has a tremendous amount to take in and process (emails, instant messages, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc., etc.), and as we have already seen, simply letting this tendency just run on autopilot (as it’s been trained to do, and will continue to do unless we wise up to it) can be highly detrimental to our productivity and well-being. So, just like other tools that we may have inherited but wisely chosen to discard, substitute or upgrade for something more sophisticated, we might also do the same with this one from time to time, or we run the risk of complete psychological exhaustion and continuously dropping the ball in the process. Now, we are not saying that you need to do away with your problem-solving mind altogether. No, that wouldn’t be wise (nor something that you could actually do, so don’t fret about that). This entrenched mental habit is still very useful in some contexts and at certain times and places. The key is to train the mind into a state of awareness that allows you to recognise when it may or may not be helpful to be engaged in analysing and problem-solving, moment by moment while you’re on the job.

For some of you out there, all this might be starting to sound rather grim and gloomy what do you reckon? As we’ve said, the world is speeding up with more and more information and our minds are wired a certain way: to habitually attempt to process any pieces of information that come their way! So is there any hope for us at all!? Well yes, there is. This hope comes from a branch of science called neuroscience and specifically with its amazing discovery of something called neuroplasticity.

The great brain wave

In essence, neuroplasticity is the term used to describe the remarkable ability that our brains have to adapt and modify themselves in response to the experiences we have as we go about our lives. Our brains are really quite a fascinating phenomenon – a really complex and intricate organ, full of neural networks and other super cool stuff. We have about 100 billion neurons in our brain which are effectively hubs of information connected to one another by neural pathways called synapses. There can be around 100 trillion synapses in the brain connecting neurons in this way. Now the really awesome thing (if all that doesn’t sound impressive enough!) is that these connections between neurons are not static; they change over time. Every time that we think, do or experience something new, a new synapse is created and then every time that we think, do or experience that same thing again, that connection is reinforced, increasing the likelihood it’ll be activated again and again and become the natural default neural connection within the brain. So effectively the brain will rewire its physical structure depending on the stuff that we choose to think, do or experience. Now how cool is that?

This phenomenon is most famously supported by a series of studies³ involving London Taxi Drivers, who need to memorise every street and place of interest within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross in central London in order to pass the qualifying ’Knowledge’ test. These taxi drivers have been shown to have larger parts of the brain called posterior hippocampi and smaller parts called anterior hippocampi (these regions of the brain are used for spatial awareness and memory) compared to control subjects. Further, significant structural changes in these taxi drivers’ brains are also directly correlated to time spent driving a taxi. So in other words, more experienced taxi drivers who have been driving and practising the Knowledge for longer have larger posterior hippocampi and smaller anterior hippocampi than newly qualified drivers. The researchers of this study conclude that ‘it seems that there is a capacity for local plastic change in the structure of the healthy adult human brain in response to environmental demands.’ (There’s a link in the ‘Useful resources’ section below to a video from National Geographic about London taxi drivers’ brains if you want to see more on this.) In short, this really is a ground-breaking finding which suggests that we can actually influence the structure of our brains, and that is exactly where the practice of mindfulness comes in.

The brain at work

In fact in a recent review of the research⁴ there were at least eight different regions of the brain highlighted that are affected by mindfulness practice (in a good way!). Two of these regions have particular significance for our experience and performance at work and we thought you’d be interested to hear a bit more about them here.

The first of these is a structure called the anterior cingulate cortex which is located deep inside the forehead just behind the brain’s frontal lobe. This part of the brain is associated with self-regulation which is import-ant when we want to refrain from knee-jerk reactions at work. It also helps to retain clear focus as well as promoting flexibility around problem-solving rather than habitually continuing to use ineffective strategies. We’re sure that you’d concur that this all seems crucial to ensure our very best performance in the highly demanding, ever changing and fast-paced environment within which we work these days.

Another key region of the brain is the hippocampus (as already mentioned in the London taxi driver studies above). This is a sea-horse shaped structure that is located behind the temple on each side of the brain. It is part of the brain’s limbic system and, as previously mentioned, is associated with not only memory but also emotion. This part of the brain can be damaged by exposure to chronic stress but neuroscientific research shows us that mindfulness practice can increase the amount of grey matter in this brain region, helping to buffer against work-related stress. So this feature of the brain too seems of great importance, specifically in building resilience which is highly desirable (we’re sure you’d also agree), so that we can continue to excel in the increasingly challenging and competitive world of our work.

With these findings in mind, and if you are anything like us, you might be starting to consider how mindfulness practice may not be something that you just ‘might like to do’ but rather something that you ‘really must do’ when it comes to ensuring your performance, endurance and sustainability at work. That is, if you want to maintain a healthy brain, increase self-regulation, effective focus, and improve your decision--making and productivity as well as your well-being while on the job.

It would seem that the choice is really ours to make. We can choose to keep travelling down old caveman/woman neural pathways on auto-pilot, or we can choose to behave differently (i.e. practise mindfulness) and create and reinforce new habits and ways of being. Isn’t it time we develop our minds so we can begin to enjoy more and excel in this modern world of work? We’d be wise to wake up to who is actually doing all this multitasking and doing. That way we can make better choices for ourselves, improve our focus and productivity and get ahead in our work. That’s exactly what mindfulness training is all about.

You might like to check out the two short videos as well as another art-icle listed in the ‘Useful resources’ section at the end of this chapter to see a bit more about how the brain’s physical structure changes with mindfulness practice. But please do remember that it’s only through purposeful mindfulness practice (not by reading this book, an article or two, or watching a video) that you can actually positively affect your brain!

So what does the research tell us about how mindfulness can help us to stay more focused and productive while at work? Can it really help us to perform well even amidst the multiple demands of our high pressured working day? And does the physical structure of our brain actually change as we practise mindfulness – well, let’s take a look.

So with all that said (and again, if you’re anything like us), we bet you’re eager and just itching to practise some more mindfulness straight away, and start positively influencing those little grey cells – oh, go on then, it’d be rude not to … let’s do it …

Exercise 2.6: Mindful on the job

Body-focused attention training

You can do this practice while sitting at your desk or just about at any other time that you choose to (you might choose to do it standing or sitting on your train journey in to or back from work). Throughout the exercise we’re going to invite you to focus your attention on your body (but remember: this is not a body exercise but an exercise of the mind – an exercise of resting in awareness – and we just happen to be using the body as something to focus on). Some pointers:

• It’s helpful to close your eyes, to limit further distractions as best you can. But if you don’t feel comfortable to do that, just droop your eyelids and focus your gaze on a still spot or object in front of you.
• As you focus attention on your body, thoughts or other distractions such as sounds, emotions, sensations, etc. will likely try to pull your attention away – try to just notice any distractions; let them come and go, rise and fall as they naturally will, as you then return your focus of attention on to your body at that moment, as best you can. Every time your attention is distracted (which is completely normal and not a sign of failure!) just notice the distraction, congratulate yourself for noticing it, and then return your attention to your body, again, and again and again.
• The purpose of this exercise is to cultivate a non-judging awareness of your experience of focusing attention on your body, accepting any distractions that may arise, returning your attention to your body, moment by moment, nothing more or less, simply that.

Ready? OK, let’s begin:

1. First, bring your attention to your feet. You may notice a sensation at the soles of your feet where your feet touch the floor and/or the sensation of your feet against the inside of your shoes. If you can’t notice any sensation, that is absolutely fine too; just notice the absence of sensation. Remember, this is not about sensation but about open and non-judgemental awareness of what is, just as it is.
2. So, there they are, your feet (with the presence or absence of any sensation) and then there is you noticing your feet, allowing your feet to take centre stage in your awareness right now.
3. Notice where your attention is now – if it is not focused on your feet, then gently guide it back to doing just that.
4. Now as you allow your feet to dissolve from your awareness, guide your attention to your legs.
5. Take a mental snapshot (much like a camera would) of how your legs are right now in this moment – notice and acknowledge their position as you sit in the chair or stand. Hold just your legs alone at centre stage in your awareness right now. Nothing more, just your legs.
6. Notice the presence or absence of sensation at your legs.
7. Next, as you allow your legs to dissolve from your awareness, gently bring your focus of attention to your arms. Hold just your arms at centre stage now; notice their position, take a mental picture of just your arms. There are your arms, the left and right one and then there is you noticing them, just them, nothing else for now.
8. Now, bring your attention to the sensation of air where it meets the surface of your skin. Maybe you can feel the sensation of air against your skin on your face, your neck, hands or any other exposed body part. Just be curious and open to noticing the sensation of air against your skin. If you can’t notice this sensation, just acknow-ledge the absence of it; that is absolutely fine too.
9. Next, begin to scan your body, from your head down to your toes and toes back up to your head with your full undivided attention. As you do this, acknowledge any warmer sensation that you may come across versus cooler sensations. It may feel warmer where your body meets the chair that you are sitting on or different body parts rest against each other. Acknowledging these warmer sensations is much like tipping your hat to a passerby as you might acknowledge them walking along the street, ‘ah, warmer sensation, I see you’. Keep scanning up and down, for the next.
10. Notice where your attention is now; if it is not scanning your body for warmer sensations, then just guide it back to doing just that.
11. Now, expand your awareness to include your entire body. Allow your whole body as it is right now to take centre stage in your awareness. Take a mental snapshot of your body, notice its position and posture as you sit in the chair/stand. There is your body and then there is you holding it at the forefront of your awareness.
12. Take a moment to recognise how your body changes; it is not the same body that you had as a young child. You may have had things cut out or put into your body. The skin at the surface of your body may have suffered scars or blemishes. Your skin may have grown hair in certain places or lost some in others. The temperature of your body can change from day to day, moment to moment. Your body can feel tired, energised, painful or relaxed or anything else. The experiences of your body change, but THE YOU that is aware of these experiences never changes; it remains the same and unaffected by these changes.
13. To end this exercise, narrow the focus of your awareness once again to zoom back on to holding just your feet alone at centre stage, as you did at the start. Maybe take a moment to marvel at the amazing ability of your awareness to expand and narrow at your will.
14. So there they are again, your feet, the left and right foot, with the presence or absence of sensation and then there is you, noticing your feet and holding just your feet alone at the forefront of your awareness – just your feet, just this one moment.
15. Now, begin to expand your awareness once again, bring to mind some of the objects that are around you, as you gently open your eyes and ground yourself back into the environment that you are in.

So how was that?

In doing this practice you may have come to experience a sense of calm, peace, tranquillity or relaxation. Remember that this was not the purpose, as this was not a relaxation exercise but an exercise of the mind, an exercise of resting in awareness, while focusing your attention on the here and now, being present and, in this case, aware of the sensations of your body. The fortunate by-product of being present in this way is improved well-being (aka relaxation) and also, from the cultivation of a clearer mind, we often will experience improved performance and functioning too.

You may have also noticed how, although your experiences (such as your experience of bodily sensations and your attention of these) are forever changing and shifting, the part of you that notices and is aware of these experiences never changes. Your awareness is much like the sky, in that whatever passes through the sky – the birds, clouds, aeroplanes, weather, rain, scorching sun, night, day, etc., the sky seems to be able to make room for it all and it remains unaffected by these events. Your awareness is the same: whatever passes through your awareness, thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc.; your awareness has room to hold it all and remains unchanged by these events.

This part of your mind is ‘pure awareness’, the ability to notice what is going on in the ‘here and now’, with openness and acceptance. There are no thoughts occurring in your ‘awareness’, as they only show up in your thinking mind, often demanding your attention. The part of your mind that can simply observe, acknowledge, notice and watch all your other experience (including where your attention is) is non-evaluative, non-judgemental and therefore by nature implicitly accepting, curious and kind. That is why we often come to experience relaxation and an absence of any stress in a practice such as this, as stress is only a consequence of thoughts (evaluative, judgemental, past or future oriented) that we are choosing not to follow with our attention.

More than this is that we tend to spend most of our time struggling with and/or defining ourselves by our ever-changing experiences, and as these are constantly shifting – whether that be one thought followed by another, one success replaced by a failure or one bodily sensation or behaviour being substituted by the next – we find ourselves in a perpetual state of fluctuating stress and instability. By stepping into the part of our mind that simply is aware of all these changes, we can again make contact with the stability and clarity of mind that resides within the present moment and enjoy the natural sense of ease, focus and productivity that comes with it. We begin to see thoughts as thoughts and feelings as feelings, rather than events that have to drive our behaviour. By widening this gap between stimulus (i.e. a thought, a feeling, etc.) and response (i.e. engaging with that thought, trying to eradicate that feeling), we have more choice about how and/or whether or not we do react. We can relate to our inner world experiences as an object of our attention rather than as a subject that we must identify with or immediately act upon without any awareness or reflection. This gives us a greater sense of calm, composition and assuredness and we are then free to choose to take wiser and more effective actions while on the job.

Balancing messy people

Generating optimum productivity, efficacy and focused attention among a workforce is a clear aim for any business in a competitive environment. However, to balance productivity and focus alongside well-being and sustainability is a fine art (more on this in Chapter 7) and raises complex questions regarding the whole ethic of any business, let alone each individual. Encouragement and incentive can swiftly swing towards bullying and job insecurity, or lack of encouragement or incentive to sloppy, ineffective work and job dissatisfaction. As a business owner, manager or grass-roots employee, we have to make constant decisions about how our values, energy and motivation fit with the desire to grow our company or compete with others to be bigger, better, faster or greater.

Therefore there are certain questions raised beyond the obvious ‘how do we improve focus and productivity?’ to ‘should we/I? Is it timely? Is there energy? Does this fit with the long-term goals and ethics of the business/myself?’

Psychologists have long struggled with how to compete with ‘harder science’ (such as Newtonian physics) because human beings simply have so many, often unpredictable variables. For example, push a billiard ball on a smooth surface with a stick and it will roll away, but push a human with a stick and it will probably push you back, cry, fall over, take the stick and ram it up your … well, you get the point. With humans, there are always unpredictable forms of behaviour; we are basically messy when it comes to science and doing what we’re told, or what is logical, rational or expected. Sorry, folks. Trying to tidy this up has itself led to even more problems. The results of statistical analysis are often criticised within psychology for removing the ‘outliers’, (or test scores which are outside of the norm) because they distort test results and make them really tricky and not the neat, sensible results which would make us feel reassured and safe, in the knowledge that humans are predictable. In other words, every time we pushed a human on a smooth surface with a stick they would always roll away. Try this experiment at home; we do not expect you to have great success.

In order to accept the exceptions to the ‘rule’, we are required to let go of predictability. A new paradigm emerges which is not based on (Newtonian or positivist) science being king. Eeek.

The metaphor of ‘man as machine’ is outmoded. People are not predictable in their actions all of the time, continually relentless in their energy or immune from ever making errors.

But before we all jump off cliffs or ram-raid the off-licence, we can also recognise that we need not descend into chaos either. In fact, the urge to categorise, make sense of and understand our world and fellow beings is natural and hardwired. The need to look towards trends, predictions, forecasts and probabilities helps most of us who work in business to form some kind of model, to manage budgets, to develop goals and strategies and to plan. This is stereotyping at worst and categorising at best: generally efficient and systematic but potentially dogmatic and narrow-minded.

So stop trying to work out the perfect formula or psychometric test to pigeon-hole yourself or your employees into their perfect role and to increase company output. That is not to say that many of us will act within the norm much of the time, but even this is not easy to predict. How many of us? How much of the time? For how long? And what will those who aren’t toeing the line be up to? This means we can open our eyes to fluctuations, changes, minorities, minutiae and exceptions. Working life becomes fluid, dynamic and creative (more on this in Chapter 4). We can potentially hold the value of the efficient and ver-ifiable alongside that which is rich in potentiality and fluent. In ethical terms this means constantly evaluating the balance of productivity and meaningful work output with the energies and capabilities available at any given time. It translates business into both science and art; if we sacrifice one for the other we compromise the long-term functionality of our work, either as individuals or as the collective workforce. Place too much emphasis on dogmatic, structured and target-driven work paradigms and burnout, discord and stress will be high, decreasing productivity, morale and focus; too little emphasis and laziness, indifference, poor quality work and lack of commitment ensue. Like fine-tuning an instrument to achieve the most beautiful quality of sound, we too can attune ourselves to the amount of applied effort required of us and our employees to encourage optimum efficiency and focus. We can understand when working overtime, for example, is a manageable and valuable strategy for ourselves and our workplace and when it becomes untenable and demotivating (more on this in Chapter 7). Yes, there may be times when we may struggle (to stay awake in that meeting about auditing, for example) or have to restrain ourselves from doing something that we think is grossly unhelpful (for example, when we repress the urge to tell the presenter to shut their cake hole), but these become less frequent and more manageable as we retrain the mind. We learn to take our foot off the gas, and learn to help and allow our co-workers and colleagues to do so too, knowing that the anxiety we hold about our work is not beneficial to us or them, and in its place we allow our enthusiasm and engagement to renew, so that focus and clarity become abundant again and productivity is increased. The natural ease which exists in the absence of our work-fuelled anxiety becomes gradually more accessible with persistent mindfulness practice and our effort at work is alive, fresh and engaged.

How to learn this with mindfulness

1. Watch the commonly held notion that mindfulness requires ‘no effort’, or should not involve effort.
2. Watch your view that ‘effort’ means wilfulness or a punitive form of discipline.
3. See if you can allow effort to be both attentive and at ease.

Exercise 2.7: Mindful on the job

Pencilled in

Practise on the effort required to balance a pencil on your finger:

1. Extend and hold one finger (or two if you’re just getting started) out.
2. Gently place a pencil onto your finger/s and balance it there.
3. Watch the mind as you do this: any habitual self-criticisms, judgements.
4. Notice how similar-themed thoughts might manifest in your working day.
5. Do these motivate you? Increase your focus? Improve the outcome?
6. Try to let these thoughts be; refocus on your moment-by-moment experience of balancing the pencil.
7. How would it be to just leave these thoughts alone?
8. As you end the exercise, notice what your mind tells you when you ‘get it right’ or ‘get it wrong’.

In this chapter we have seen how mindfulness can help us to retain and also sharpen our focus, efficiency and productivity. We find ourselves working in a day and age where we are bombarded with incessant digital information which in turn increases distractibility, and ineffectiveness ensues. Mindfulness is just the tool to help us cope with this. We can now understand that to improve our focus and productivity we need not necessarily reduce the amount of work that we do or at second best chuck all our mobile devices onto the nearest scrap heap, but instead we can choose to simply do one task at one time to enhance our efficiency and effectiveness. With practice we can unveil the sharp-edged focus and productivity that naturally lies just beneath our anxious, excited and often all too busy-doing-nothing exterior; we retrain our minds and as a result become more effective workers. Practising mindfulness is a mental workout. By returning our wandering attention to our present-moment experience – to the breath, the body or anything else that we choose – time and time again we are strengthening the neural pathways that increase our ability to stay focused and more effective. While at our desk, our mind wanders to another inbound email, that other piece of work, the latest news flash maybe, the sounds from the office floor or what’s for dinner that evening, and then we purposefully guide our attention back to the task at hand, or our breath, etc. This simple yet highly effective practice (if continuously repeated) is not to be underestimated; it has the power to rewire our brains, reduce our tendency to drift off and become lost in unproductive patterns of thought; it has the power to keep us present, stable, attentive and productive on the job.

So how are you doing? Still with us? We hope by now that your interest and appetite is growing. Mindfulness really does have so much to offer us in our work and business and we have only just started to scratch the surface of all this. We are really keen to turn your attention to the application of mindfulness for work-related stress and well-being, our relationships with colleagues at work, a healthy business culture, our creativity and, specifically, workplace confidence next, if you’re up for it? Oh go on … there’s loads more insights and practices to come.

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• Killingsworth, M. (2011, November). Want to be happier? Stay in the moment [video file]. Retrieved from: http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_killingsworth_want_to_be_happier_stay_in_the_moment
• Killingsworth, M. (2013, August 1). Does mind-wandering make you unhappy [article on mindful.org]. Retrieved from: http://www.mindful.org/does-mind-wandering-make-you-unhappy/
• National Geographic. (n.d.). London taxi drivers’ brains [video file]. Retrieved from: http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/london-taxi-sci
• Scientific American. (2013, October 31). How does meditation change the brain? Instant egghead #54 [video file]. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0DMYs4b2Yw
• Smiling Mind. (2015, February 2). Mind the bump – mindfulness and how the brain works [video file]. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNCB1MZDgQA
• Stromberg, J. (2015, August 27). What science says about meditation: it improves your focus and emotional control [Vox.com; science and health article]. Retrieved from: http://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9214697/meditation-brain-neuroscience
• Szalavitz, M. (2008, January 1). 10 ways we get the odds wrong [Psychology Today article]. Retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200712/10-ways-we-get-the-odds-wrong